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I worked at Twilio for nearly 10 years and it's hard to overstate what a gift it was to work there and see Jeff operate as CEO up-close. He created an environm

• throwaway_108 3y ago
  It's also why George Hu left Twilio. Because Jeff wanted to be a celebrity CEO, and it was to the detriment of the company. All of Twilio's growth (as a public company) happened on George's watch. I don't think it's a coincidence that well after George left, on Jeff's watch - they had to do 3 different layoff for a total of ~24% of their entire public company being let go. Note: former senior level Twilio employee, posted anonymous for obvious reasons.
  • vehementi 3y ago
    Did any of those layoffs coincide with the global layoffs?
    • Moto7451 3y ago
      September of 2022, Feb 2023, and December 2023. So no, kinda, and no.
      • darth_avocado 3y ago
        Sep 2022 and Feb 2023 was the peak layoff season in the industry. Mostly guided by interest rate hikes.
  • jmacd 3y ago
    George Hu cut his teeth under Benioff during the most meteoric rise of both Salesforce and Benioff's celebrity. I would be very surprised if Jeff's desire to be a public facing CEO would even cause George to notice, let alone bristle at. It's more likely that someone as smart as George might have just looked at the fundamentals of the business and decided it could not keep this up over the long term. or... it might have just been epic timing too. Probably.
    • kelnos 3y ago
      I don't have any direct knowledge, but the gossip flying around internally at the time was that a big part of George leaving Twilio was because he wanted the CEO role, but knew Jeff wasn't going to leave and give it to him. That was gossip, of course; sure, George may have decided back then that -- even with all the growth he drove -- Twilio wasn't going anywhere long-term.
      • jmacd 3y ago
        The fact that George has not taken on a CEO role since tells me that it probably wasn't a driving factor for him. That's conjecture though. I think that role would be available to him at a lot of strong companies if that was his goal.
  • marcinzm 3y ago
    Being a celebrity CEO makes sense when interest rates are low and your main job is to keep convincing investors to pump in money. Of course when interest rates are high, and your main job is business and company fundamentals that's a lot less useful. I'm seeing a lot of startups (and public companies) with CEOs like that floundering right now.
  • gkoberger 3y ago
    This is a genuine question... isn't that his job? For a public company, the CEO has to be a public CEO. Everyone takes on a different persona (some sell themselves as business geniuses, others as creative geniuses, and others as someone you wanna grab a beer with). Some really like it, and some do it begrudgingly. But at the end of the day, you can't be the same CEO of a public company as you were when you were private. I've never known Jeff to hobnob with celebrities, travel in luxury or abandon his company. I'm not sure he's a "celebrity CEO" as much as he just became a public one, although I don't know him personally. (FWIW, this is the reason I'd never want to go public. I personally don't like the system, but that doesn't mean it's not how the system works.)
    • wslh 3y ago
      > For a public company, the CEO has to be a celebrity CEO. No. Look at S&P 500 CEOs.
    • marcinzm 3y ago
      I've seen celebrity CEOs in non-public companies a lot more than in public companies. There is a difference between being the public face of the company and being a celebrity CEO.
    • dragontamer 3y ago
      Only if you pretend that the CEOs job is purely for raising money. Nominally, CEOs are supposed to run the company and help brew the culture that makes that company productive. We've grown a bunch of celebrity CEOs because people stopped caring about how companies worked over the last 10 years of low interest rates. But now that it's harder to raise money, it's time to see these guys run the companies they built.
      • gkoberger 3y ago
        Everything you said here is true, but I don't think it applies to Twilio or Jeff. I don't think you can accuse Jeff of not caring about company culture. He built one of the defining dev cultures out there. Yes, this have changed as they've grown, but I've always found the people and offices of Twilio to be warm, productive and smart. And Twilio was forged in the hardest time to raise money ever... 2008. If anyone knows how hard it is to build in a climate without easy money, it would be Jeff.
  • swyx 3y ago
    is that you, George Hu?
  • antiraza 3y ago
    I don't know the specifics of these two CEOs, but those were two very different eras financially in the tech sector. To nail all of it on just a CEO's door feels reductive, at best.
  • EMCymatics 3y ago
    Why would that be why George Hu left Twilio? A CEO has to be the face of the company and needs a good reputation. It seems like he was a good leader. From an outsider it looks wrong.
  • pinkfairy10 3y ago
    ...George left right as ZIRP ended. Maybe coincidence but that played a big part in TWLO's growth and subsequent stalling as well
  • anildash 3y ago
    Please. George joined the company when it was damn near a decade old, and already a publicly-traded company. It's embarrassing to ascribe anywhere near the agency to someone like that than to a founder.
• kfk 3y ago
  [flagged]
• acchow 3y ago
  > Wanna build a video game that teaches developers how to code and use Twilio? Let's try it! Wanna build an AI application with Tony Hawk and have Tony Hawk debug the code live on stage? Sure! These are the strange effects of ZIRP and infinite QE. Many companies never had to care at all about profit and could just do things "for fun", and still see valuations skyrocket as long as they hired more people. What a time.
  • fnordpiglet 3y ago
    In my 32 years in the industry the best performing companies always did these things regardless of the macroeconomic climate. It’s when you ceded leadership to the accountants and shifted gears to maintenance mode that companies stopped growing. You never did these things for fun, you did these things because they had some knock on effect that made it potentially worth it, and in a portfolio of many small bets some would blow up into your next big product. Even the ones that seem far left field they created an environment where people felt allowed to dream at all, and their knock on effect was in creation of a risk taking culture. Blaming low interest rates on taking risk and doing highly speculative things, and investing in a culture that values that by funding off the wall stuff puts too much emphasis on the capital markets. If the company was a steel producer, fine. If it’s a company that essentially captures the stuff of dreams and produces a service that executes thought stuff in machines, you have to decouple your R&D from capital management to the extent your free cash flow can accept it. Note of course low interest rates and other capital market looseness will create more opportunity for this behavior, and not every company doing these things is doing some is a well managed way. But they don’t have to - that’s the magic of capitalism. Through a Darwinian process only those who strike magic win and survive and the others recycle and try again. This feels like a feature not a flaw of zero interest rates - it creates enormous value by virtue of incentivizing taking risk at a time of high innovation. There are times in history where innovation rates were very low, and zero interest rates would just incentivize broken behavior. But at a time when almost all growth is coming from innovation, maybe loose credit is smart. ml
    • ctvo 3y ago
      > In my 32 years in the industry the best performing companies always did these things regardless of the macroeconomic climate. Agreed. Creative, high performing people don't do well in a work environment that's structured like a regional bank. Valve Software -- incredibly profitable, high performing and private company, did fun things like hire economists (and then later Greek prime minister) to study and simulate virtual, in-game economies [0]. Blizzard Entertainment had giant statues of orcs made and fan conventions before their downfall, ya know, in the ZIRP macro economic environment. Google allowed their engineers 20% time. Before ZIRP. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis#Academic_career#Academic_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis#Academic_care...
• toddmorey 3y ago
  My question is what these activist investors think the fix is. In my experience they’ll bring someone in to try to apply aggressive sales strategies to a dev tools company & it never goes well.
  • LewisVerstappen 3y ago
    Twilio already uses aggressive sales strategies. They make you deposit $20 to test out their API AND THEN they tell you to get approved by talking to customer support. I was unable to get approved so I guess I'm out $20 for no reason. They have the worst dev experience I've ever seen.
  • kelnos 3y ago
    I think they've already made that clear: sell off the underperforming data & applications units. But my feeling is they really just want to strip the company for parts and/or sell it to private equity.
    • tootie 3y ago
      I'm having trouble parsing this against what Twilio does. Are they talking primarily about the Segment acquisition? I primarily know Twilio as an SMS gateway.
• LewisVerstappen 3y ago
  Interesting. I tried to create a Twilio account 2 weeks ago and it was the worse developer experience I've ever had by far. Like seriously. They first make you deposit $20 to get started. THEN, they tell you to talk to customer support to activate your account (customer support took forever to reply). Oh and then I had to fill out like 3 applications and my text messages are still randomly getting blocked - I have no idea why. To be clear, this is literally just me using Twilio to text myself to test out the API. I'm not some spammer or something. It was impossible to get started.
  • Phurist 3y ago
    You have to thanks the abusers and scammers for that. All nice things have to be locked down :(
    • LewisVerstappen 3y ago
      okay but if I only need to text ONE phone number (and I can prove ownership over that phone number), then why so many restrictions? There should be an easier way to just test out the API.
  • EugeneOZ 3y ago
    They had really nice APIs but they had not enough protection from spammers. But APIs were really sweet...
  • itinerantwarble 3y ago
    This is industry self-regulation. See A2P 10DLC. Dealing with it at scale has sucked. If you want to send SMS, it's the price of admission everywhere--not just at Twilio. I know you said you wanted to send yourself an SMS, but you can test without sending using test credentials and magic numbers: https://www.twilio.com/docs/messaging/tutorials/automate-testing https://www.twilio.com/docs/messaging/tutorials/automate-tes...
    • aisha_mc 3y ago
      There has been an increase in SMS phishing attacks too.
• anildash 3y ago
  Strongly seconding this (especially as someone who was backstage with Jeff and Tony right before that demo). What's less visible is the impact and influence Jeff has had in enabling leaders and founders to do the right thing. So much of the pressure and industry influence on CEOs is to be short-term thinkers, to ruin their user experience, or to be harmful to workers. I've seen, both personally and through others who've relied on his example or mentorship, Jeff be a force for good for those who were trying to do right while leading companies. And to even be someone to call in (or call out) a mistake when you make it — which a lot of bigger-name people are way too cowardly to do. He's also spoken up for his city, and for vulnerable communities, when it would have been so easy for someone of his stature to just stay silent. It's obvious that Jeff is a brilliant technical innovator, but he is just as much of a pioneer of thoughtful and conscientious leadership in an industry that's become woefully bereft of it.
• crabasa 3y ago
  People who weren't there don't understand, but the world before "Ask Your Developer" was completely different than the world we live in today where developers are at the heart of how decisions are made, products are built and how the world itself is changing. I joined Twilio in 2012 and I saw first hand how pivotal Jeff was in supporting the idea that in order for a platform to be successful it needed to treat developers like first class citizens, and not simply the recipient of a "directive to integrate" from the CTO. This idea wasn't simply a fist bump to devs for cool points, it was a recognition that developers themselves held the key to innovation and creating radically new things. This culture led to entirely new ways of building API docs, designing developer dashboards, creating developer events, and so on. So many of these things have become mainstream and the new baseline for platform companies that people forget how unlikely it was in the beginning and how hard Jeff had to fight to keep the company from treating developers as a means, and not as an end. And I think all developers who are happily hacking away on a free tier of a cool API with excellent docs and a vibrant developer community should tip their hat to a person who helped make this normal and influenced a generation of leaders to do the same.
• rakkhi 3y ago
  Interesting examples, sounds like a great developer playground but not so much on achieving shareholder objectives? Maybe another reason he was fired?
  • radiojosh 3y ago
    Probably as good at delivering shareholder value as anyone. Probably just didn't want to play ball when investors started asking him to strip out all the value to the customer and put the screws to the employees and purge anything and everything that might be mistaken for humanity and goodness. They love to do that shit and then pretend their new hollowed out strip mine is "lean".
• craigdennis 3y ago
  It's all fun and games till someone sucks Macklemore into the cloud. Jeffiel kept the fun and weird alive and it was a helluva ride. Kudos Jeff!